"This story is striking, in part, for its adept use of mechanical imagery in a narrative very much concerned with the living body. “Machines hum from every corner of your apartment: television, refrigerator, coffee maker,” Romanosky writes. “You are a good listener.” Erica’s mother, after losing a breast to cancer, “lopes around the house like a machine with a loose wire.” Throughout the story, the characters attend to and imitate machines with ample emotion but little enlightenment. The artificial industriousness around them comes into sharp contrast with their living, breathing, malformed selves. For this family, women’s bodies exist in a perpetual state of brokenness." -Natalie Shapero
Check out the rest of the "Why We Chose It" on The Kenyon Review blog at: https://www.kenyonreview.org/2013/10/chose/